What are the job responsibilities of marketing technology management?

Thank you to everyone who participated in our 2019 Martech Salary Survey. We’re analyzing the compensation data now, and we’ll release the full results at the MarTech conference in San Jose in just a few weeks. (There’s still time left to snag a ticket — it’s a packed agenda you won’t want to miss.)

But as an advance look, I want to share with you the data we collected about marketing technology and operations roles and responsibilities. (Click on the graphic above for a full-screen — i.e., readable — view of the chart.) Having run this survey two years in a row — here’s the data from last year — we can see how these roles are evolving longitudinally over time.

For our analysis, we filtered the data down to only those respondents who reported their role as primarily marketing technology, marketing operations, or combined marketing operations and technology management. We excluded respondents who identified as a “digital” role instead — even though many have martech responsibilities — to focus on dedicated marketing tech and ops positions.

For 2018, n=432 respondents were qualified by this criteria. For 2019, n=371. The survey was global, although the majority of respondents were from the US.

Top 5 Marketing Technology & Operations Responsibilities

One of the first things that jumps out from the year-over-year data is the consistency of the top five responsibilities. From martech staff and managers up to more senior directors and VPs, these are the core functions that these roles deliver to the organization:

Research and recommend new marketing technology products.

Operate marketing technology products as an administrator.

Train and support marketing staff on using marketing technology products.

Integrate marketing technology products with each other.

Monitor data quality within marketing technology products.

If you’re looking for a brief marketing technologist job description, that’s a pretty good one.

While the foundation of marketing technology management is centralizing technology and data — the “operating” in marketing operations — real success in these roles is often achieved through connecting to the rest of this grid.

Training and supporting marketing staff on martech is key to modern marketing enablement. Integrating martech that may be decentralized across marketing helps more teams use more specialized tools without being siloed. Monitoring data quality looks for anomalies in customer experiences and empowers front-line staff to identify and fix erroneous information.

Researching and recommending new marketing technologies is a key element of embracing continuous change.

Changes and Gaps in Martech Responsibilities

As we go further down the list, there were a couple of significant drops in the frequency of other martech responsibilities. Participants in this year’s survey were a little less likely to:

Reduced technical reviews may be a function of the maturing of martech products. They’re more polished. Many have been around long enough now to have established track records. More of them are certified partners in the ecosystems of major martech platforms, which can simplify their integration and provide some assurance of their quality and interoperability.

The 10% drop in identifying and sundowning outdated or unused martech isn’t huge. But at 47%, less than half of marketing technologists reported this as one of their job responsibilities. Maybe in the scheme of ever expanding martech stacks this isn’t a top priority. After all, many of these tools are cheap or free. But still, good marketing stack hygiene feels like it should be higher on the list.

But what really concerns me are the two responsibilities highlighted in orange below:

It is disappointing that, for the second year in a row, performing data privacy and compliance reviews and performing security reviews both remained at the bottom of the list of martech responsibilities — and even dropped a few percentage points.

Given the current environment, where privacy regulations and data security breaches present increasing risks to brands — both financially and reputationally — it seems imprudent for these responsibilities to be “not my job” in marketing technology and operations.

I’m willing to acknowledge the excuse that perhaps an IT or security team outside of marketing operations carries the mantle of governing privacy and security. It’s wise to have a dedicated security expert conduct reviews. But even when that’s true — and I believe IT should provide expertise and oversight here — it does not absolve marketing technologists of their duty to manage their stacks with these factors in mind too.

In the marketing stack, security should be everyone’s job.

Differences Between Junior and Senior Martech Responsibilities

This year, we also segmented the martech job responsibilities data into two groups:

The differences aren’t surprising, although it is reassuring to see that several strategic martech responsibilities that had lower averages overall were ranked significantly higher among senior martech leaders. Senior roles are much more likely — 37% to 42% more likely — to:

Pay for marketing technology products from a budget, partially or fully (71%)

With more than 2/3 of these senior-level martech positions given the above authority, we can add these three responsibilities to the core job description of such roles. The majority of senior martech leaders also own these responsibilities:

Identify and consolidate multiple instances of same or similar marketing technology products (56%)

It’s also a bit encouraging to see that 44% of senior martech leaders perform data privacy and compliance reviews — up 9% from the overall average of 36%. But it should be a responsibility of the majority of these roles. And still only 27% perform security reviews.

As a profession, we’ve got work to do on privacy, compliance, and security.

Customizing Martech Without Tears Code

This year’s data also revealed a slight drop, from 43% to 35%, of participants reporting that they customize martech products with software development.

It could be that the out-of-the-box capabilities of martech products, particularly with all the off-the-shelf choices available inside marketing platform ecosystems, offered by certified third-party developers, have reduced the need for homegrown martech software.

One thing is clear from this year’s data. Marketing technology management continues to mature as a profession, with increasingly well-defined roles and responsibilities.

P.S. If you’re working in or leading marketing technology management, one more thing is for sure: the MarTech conference is for you. Come join us April 3-5 in San Jose to hear about vendor-agnostic martech leadership strategies from brands such as Aetna, Autodesk, Cisco Meraki, Docker, The New York Times, Netflix, Nordstrom, NPR, Sub-Zero, Zillow, and more.

Comments

Great stuff, Scott. There are some interesting meta’s here. The top responsibilities aren’t much of a surprise. It’s revealing that architecting the stack and integrating with non-marketing tools are lower down. Very glad you called out lack of privacy & security attention. IMHO, there’s a discussion that’s badly needed here – we’re missing a huge opportunity to raise all our brands by putting consent, privacy and running a surveillance-free marketing practice at the top of the list. And an under-discussed moral dilemma about our missions. Let’s start having that conversation!